(collage: trasvorder)
Devout Ishmaelite Yoshi chips in a write up of his experience seeing Shabazz in DC a couple of weeks ago:
The duo
came out like serpents, Ish slivers away and into
the crowd on beat, body-nodding, only hands glued to the sample-box,
everything else fluid
motion. Tendai was still the whole time, a solid music box, dynamism and
magic
without seeming to go anywhere physically; transporter. The first song
is glorious splendiferous
magnificent. Choral lines, but not choir-like. Epic voices rising, but
not in a melodic pattern I could frame. A sample? Probably, but how? The
solid beat is power, mind-flowing. I ask after the show if this first
track has already been recorded,
if it is on the new album (assuming there is a new album). Ish smiles,
says
yes. Later on I also ask Tendai the exact same question when we get a
few
moments to speak, bespeak. I asked each of them individually because the
song
was that good. I asked them both at separate occasions because I was a
detective
investigating two suspects and wanting to corroborate their story.
Writers like these enjoy distortions, I know this. I know who I'm
dealing with. This case is
too important, the music had said to me. Can't leave it up to the
bureaucrats. We’ve got too much riding on this one. That
beat is too gargantuan and simultaneously smooth. Too dream-like. Of
course it
may never be as good as the live show. It never will be quite the same.
At one
point towards the end of a show that seemed to never-end, Ish began
another new
beat. It was an off-kilter, drunken sounding shuffle of a Caribbean
groove, steel pans perhaps, I forget gladly. The beat was a nonsensical
drink. And there he was, rapper of the moment, still
flowing some kind of flow over it. Music. What does music say? It says
what
Kevin Garnett once said when he beheld a golden trophy in his fingers,
“Anything is possible.” And it means it.
This, my
fourth opportunity to see the best live show of our
era, was a gift, and surely the best yet. Often I wonder what these
great guys
are doing touring non-stop. I think, why not just get busy making a new
album? It
seems odd, if you, like I, forget that the live space is clearly a space
for
creation in itself. I forget that every time I am not at a Shabazz
Palaces gig,
and I remember it every time I am. Much like when I saw them at Santo’s
Party
House in 2011, there were new songs here. Some may see the light of the
day,
some may not. I know these two magicians know a groove when they stumble
upon
one, it haunts like a ghost. I know how some beats go into the night and
never come back. But practical reality kicks in too, like a kick. Being
a musician, one knows that shows this well rehearsed and flowed don't
go entirely by spontaneity, yo. If a sample is sample, and triggered by a
light, it must be real. It won't be truly forgotten. Thus, confident, I
was that the two suspects would say ‘yes’ before I asked if that
mesmerizing first track would be on their new album. Whatever the new
album
will be. A leaf falling from a tree, and being blown up and around-round
for
quite some time. If it falls, nobody sees it. Just the swirls of legend,
and concentrated
African-American girls who are won over by the beat as the concert
deepens and musicality
expands and Tendai loses it wildly and safely in a drum solo that
somehow stays
on beat through the barbaric storm of heat and meat. Through the murder
that Ish kills it with through his open-source,
freestyle programmed Ish-ness, which is way cooler than what the rest of
the pups make
up in their packets and meals, microwaved. The people were won over by
it, as they must be at every show, where I see their faces slowly go,
glow, realizing what this is, a display of opportunity and
seed-flowering to its potential. Humans rising like trees to their
beautiful specific potentialities. This show was a cool heatwave. The
encore was more. Too much, I keep on thinking at these shows. "Too
much!". Like I
should have stopped this article a few sentences ago, but excess can be
=plush=
and thus enjoyable in brief fragments.
May the force continue.
